Yes, he was. I forget what season. And James Marsters said he would never, ever play a rapist again because he realized while playing the scene that it was too fucking disturbing to get into a rapist's head.

I don't remember everything about it, but I remember it being hard to watch. I'm pretty sure it was problematic, but I also recall they didn't play it up for sexiness or anything like that. In my memory it was played awkward and horrible.

They also made his redemption arc really long and arduous, which I think was a good choice.

Edit: I should clarify it was only once, with Buffy. He wasn't a repeat offender.

Plus he didn't seem to quite realize that's what he was doing. After Buffy pushed him away, he was horrified by his own actions (he basically proceeded directly from there to go get himself a soul, it obviously had quite an effect on him). Not that it made a difference to Buffy, nor should it have, but there are levels.

Although, really, it's ridiculous to take it as a given that Evil Spike (or, for that matter, Evil Angelus) never raped anyone. They tortured and murdered women, men, and children on a regular basis. For fun. I doubt that they would've considered rape as somehow "beneath them." Although one never knows, I guess.

The fact that Buffy and company more or less shrugged this off about Spike long before he regained his soul, as if he was anything else but an unrepentant mass murderer who was only walking around free (more or less) because he'd spent over a century evading imprisonment and execution...well, It's In The Script. I doubt that they'd have let (quick check, what infamous serial killer was still alive at the time)* Richard "Night Stalker" Ramirez just hang around with the gang and crack jokes about his past atrocities, even if he too had been somehow rendered incapable of hurting humans.

Supposedly, when Spike didn't have a soul, he was, by definition, Evil. As if it were an objective trait, like height or fangs, that he couldn't change even if he wanted to (without, you know, getting his soul back). Which, oddly enough, leads back to a point I've raised ad nauseum about Devil People in the Sinfestiverse.

But I'm way tangenting so I'll stop.

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*David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz is in fact still alive, but he didn't get as...intense as Ramirez (and Spike) did; not as if that did his victims any good, but like I just said, there are levels

As far as I know, Spike never raped anyone else. He may have, but I don't recall evidence for it in the show.

And he was by definition evil, but it seemed to me that to some extent that was an excuse; if people know that they'll turn evil after changing, then even if changing never made anyone evil, they might just feel free to be as evil as possible all on their own - and in Spike's case, he tried to come back from that.

I haven't watched the show recently enough to talk very intelligently about it, or why that was the impression I got._________________[Stripeypants has enabled lurk mode.]

I'd be very, VERY careful with this phrase when talking about whether someone was a rapist or not. Some rapes do happen that way, and they are as much rapes as those that revel in the act of violation.

I'd be very, VERY careful with this phrase when talking about whether someone was a rapist or not. Some rapes do happen that way, and they are as much rapes as those that revel in the act of violation.

Well, I said it didn't make a difference to Buffy, nor should it. That was kind of intended to convey what you're saying. My apologies if that's not how it panned out. :-/

Yesterday I saw Once Upon a Time in America. Sorry everyone for the spoiler, put yeah, it has a rape scene and the character at the end is sympathetic.

...I'm still trying to figure out how, exactly, that happens, but probably has to do with a 30 or more years timeskip where the character has abandoned his life as a gangster. Perhaps the fact that we have 3 hours worth of a movie explaining exactly the kind of life that led him to end up as such a horrible person before he commits the act.

Anyway, it happens, it's very ugly and the character ends up as the good guy.

Go watch it. The most uncut version lasts more than four hours, but it's worth every minute.

EDIT: Well, good guy might be pushing it. Protagonist is more like it but yeah, amongst all of the other horrible people he's the easiest one to sympathise with._________________Welcome to Sinfest, the only place with a 46 pages long thread about sentient toasters

I've never seen the movie in question, but how many movies have there been where "the good guy" had, at some point in his past, murdered somebody? Where "the good guy" murders somebody (and not necessarily "irredeemable scum" OSLT) in the course of the story? Is murder more "forgiveable" than rape?

Apparently so. Spike committed murder for over a century (if he murdered one victim a week (which seems a rather conservative estimate), he killed well over five thousand people), and everybody was pretty much "ehh." ("the voices of innocents crying out for justice"? where?)* Anya committed murder for over a millennium (admittedly, as "vengeance" for wronging women, but, based upon some of her actions in Season Seven, the crime of being an insensitive jerk was enough to qualify; murdering people for being jerks seems a tad harsh), same reaction.

I suppose this all means something profound about contemporary society but I don't know what.

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*okay, yes, obviously, from a real-world perspective, Spike couldn't be executed for his crimes (in the way countless other vampires, demons, etc. were) or he wouldn't have been have been able to appear in the series, but in-universe, that perspective doesn't exist